Terminology Glossary

Problem This Solves

Jenkins deploys a dense specialized vocabulary drawn from media studies, marketing theory, fan studies, political science, and his own coinage. Many terms carry precise meanings that diverge from everyday usage (e.g., "convergence" is cultural, not technological; "participation" is distinct from "interactivity"). Without a quick-reference map of this vocabulary, readers conflate related concepts, misapply frameworks, or miss the distinctions that make Jenkins's arguments precise.

This glossary collects roughly 40 essential terms organized by thematic cluster, with chapter origins and concise definitions preserving Jenkins's intent.

Key Principle

Jenkins's terminology forms an interlocking system. Core concepts (convergence, participatory culture, collective intelligence) define the landscape; analytical terms (affective economics, transmedia storytelling, moral economy) provide tools for examining specific phenomena; and descriptive terms (zappers, casuals, loyals) classify observable behaviors. Understanding the system requires seeing how terms relate, not memorizing them in isolation.

Convergence and Media Change

• Convergence (Introduction): The flow of content across multiple media platforms, cooperation between media industries, and migratory behavior of audiences. A cultural process, not a technological endpoint.
• Convergence culture (Introduction): The cultural condition where old and new media collide, grassroots and corporate media intersect, and producer-consumer power interacts unpredictably.
• Black Box Fallacy (Introduction): The mistaken belief that all media will funnel into one device. Delivery technologies die; media as cultural systems persist.
• Corporate convergence (Introduction): Top-down, industry-driven content flow across platforms to expand revenue and cement loyalty.
• Grassroots convergence (Introduction): Bottom-up, consumer-driven flow when audiences archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content.
• Media in transition (Introduction): Phase during which social, cultural, economic, and legal understandings of media readjust.
• Protocols (Introduction, via Lisa Gitelman): Economic, legal, social, and cultural practices emerging around a communications medium -- not the technology itself, but the human systems surrounding it.
• Divergence (Introduction): Diversification of media channels and devices. Convergence and divergence are two sides of the same phenomenon.

Participatory Culture and Fan Studies

• Participatory culture (Introduction): Culture in which audiences are invited to actively participate in creating and circulating new content, not merely consume passively.
• Participation (Introduction): Audience engagement shaped by cultural and social protocols rather than by technology itself. Distinct from interactivity.
• Interactivity (Ch. 4): Potential of technology to respond to consumer feedback; pre-structured by the designer. Contrasted with participation, which is open-ended and culturally shaped.
• Participation gap (Introduction/Conclusion): Unequal ability to participate meaningfully in convergence culture. Extends beyond "digital divide" (access) to skills, opportunities, and cultural factors including race, class, and language.
• Fan culture (Ch. 4): Culture produced by fans for circulation through an underground economy, drawing on commercial culture as raw material.
• Folk culture (Ch. 4): Culture where creativity occurs at grassroots level, skills pass through informal education, exchange is reciprocal. Jenkins frames fan culture as folk culture revitalized.
• Zone of tolerance (Ch. 4): Range of fan activity media companies implicitly permit without legal action. Never fixed; shifts with corporate strategy and fan pushback.
• Prohibitionists vs. Collaborationists (Ch. 4): Two corporate stances toward fan creativity -- control/suppress versus cooperate/enable.
• Moral economy (Ch. 4, via E.P. Thompson): Implicit social contract between producers and consumers governing acceptable practices on both sides.

Marketing and Audience Theory

• Affective economics (Ch. 2): Marketing paradigm focused on the emotional underpinnings of consumer decision-making.
• Lovemarks (Ch. 2, via Kevin Roberts/Saatchi & Saatchi): Brands commanding "loyalty beyond reason" through deep emotional investment.
• Inspirational consumers (Ch. 2, via Kevin Roberts): Most engaged brand consumers who publicly express preferences and pressure companies to maintain brand values.
• Emotional capital (Ch. 2, via Steven J. Heyer): The ways consumers' emotional investment in media content and brands increases brand worth.
• Zappers / Casuals / Loyals (Ch. 2): Three tiers of viewer engagement -- nomadic channel-surfers, convenience viewers, and deeply invested return audiences.
• Impression vs. Expression (Ch. 2): Impression counts eyeballs; expression measures active audience participation and engagement. The shift from one to the other is central to affective economics.
• Brand communities (Ch. 2, via Robert Kozinets): Communities organized around emotional attachment to a brand, with four participant types: devotees, insiders, minglers, tourists.
• Madison + Vine (Ch. 2): Industry term for collaboration between content producers and advertisers in shaping the emotional experience of a franchise.

Storytelling and World-Building

• Transmedia storytelling (Ch. 3): Stories unfolding across multiple media platforms, each medium making distinctive contributions to the whole. Not adaptation but expansion.
• Additive comprehension (Ch. 3, via Neil Young/EA): Each new medium's contribution shifts understanding of the entire franchise.
• World-making (Ch. 3): Designing a fictional universe sufficiently detailed for many stories but coherent enough that each fits.
• Cultural attractor (Ch. 3, via Levy/Jenkins): A work that draws together a like-minded community around shared interests.
• Cultural activator (Ch. 3, via Levy/Jenkins): A work that gives a gathered community something to do -- sets knowledge production and meaning-making in motion.
• Co-creation (Ch. 3): Collaborative design across media platforms from the start, versus licensing rights after the fact.
• Redundancy (Ch. 3): Repetition of information across platforms. Contrasted with additive comprehension, where each platform contributes something new.

Knowledge and Citizenship

• Collective intelligence (Introduction, via Pierre Levy): Knowledge pooled voluntarily by community members. "None of us can know everything; each of us knows something; we can put the pieces together."
• Knowledge culture (Introduction, via Levy): Community emerging around the sharing and evaluation of knowledge.
• Affinity spaces (Ch. 5, via James Paul Gee): Informal learning environments organized around shared interests where participants develop literacy through collaborative work.
• Monitorial citizen (Ch. 6, via Michael Schudson): Citizens collectively monitoring developing situations, accessing knowledge on a need-to-know basis rather than mastering all available information.
• Critical utopianism (Conclusion): Jenkins's self-described stance -- identifying progressive possibilities in convergence while remaining honest about obstacles. Contrasted with critical pessimism.
• Smart mobs (Ch. 6, via Howard Rheingold): People able to act in concert through mobile/networked devices even if they do not know each other.
• Adhocracy (Conclusion, via Cory Doctorow): Organization characterized by lack of hierarchy where leadership shifts as tasks change and knowledge is turned into action.

Key Quotes

"By convergence, I mean the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences." -- Jenkins, Introduction

"As long as the focus remains on access, reform remains focused on technologies; as soon as we begin to talk about participation, the emphasis shifts to cultural protocols and practices." -- Jenkins, Introduction

"What emerges might be called a moral economy of information: that is, a sense of mutual obligations and shared expectations about what constitutes good citizenship within a knowledge community." -- Jenkins, Conclusion

Rules of Thumb

• When Jenkins says "convergence," he means a cultural shift in how people produce and consume media -- not devices merging functions.
• "Participation" and "interactivity" are not synonyms: interactivity is designed into systems; participation is driven by cultural practice.
• The participation gap is broader than the digital divide: it includes cultural factors that shape who participates, not just who has access.
• Terms from different chapters often form pairs or tensions: corporate/grassroots convergence, impression/expression, prohibitionist/collaborationist, redundancy/additive comprehension.

Related References

• Producer-Consumer Dynamics - the negotiation patterns these terms describe in action
• Rules of Thumb - actionable heuristics applying these concepts